Airport lonely

   There is lonely and then there is airport lonely.
   Saturday I returned Ben and Caroline’s car to them via one straight nine-hour drive to Indiana. (The car had an accident in Little Rock the night of Michael’s memorial; it spent more than a week in a body shop here.)
   Indiana 69 was about 90 miles of blazing hardwood forest, humps of color on rolling hills. And the visit was fun. The older granddaughter made me hop 2 miles up and down the hallway, according to Fitbit.
   Sunday I flew home. It was an uneventful flight, except for an exchange with my silent seatmate as the plane crossed over Granite Mountain near Little Rock. I had imagined it was the size of a mall, but it went on and on until I wasn’t sure what I was seeing. So I asked this silent, coughing man what it was, and he said, Granite Mountain. I said Wow. And he said Yeah. I asked, that’s nepheline syenite? He said, I don’t know what that is. A feldspar, I said. Oh, he said.
   Then came the mourning moment. As I hurried along the airport past the gates, headed for the exit, I realized Michael was not waiting out there.

   And it was the first time in my adult life I had walked that airport without finding him at the end, waiting for me with a hug.

Mowing the lawn

   While I was mowing the lawn at my Mom's former home today, it struck me how easy it was to do. And yet, over the past two months, Michael dreaded being asked to do it. Dreaded it.
   Also, I remembered how he would call me at work to report all his lawn-mowing. In the past two months, he called several times in a row every afternoon. Usually he would report that he had mowed some section of our lawn. Usually, I was slamming my head against a deadline and had to apologize that I couldn't talk.
   I did feel bad about continually rebuffing his calls, but also I felt annoyed. 
   I forgive myself for that. 
   If he had said to me, “Something is wrong with my heart and I am scared,” not only would I have stopped what I was doing, I would have rushed home to be with him.

   Maybe he didn’t know he was worried.
   Maybe he wasn’t worried.

   Throughout the last year, his final year, if I sent him a text, he would immediately call to repeat to me the information I had just texted him. Every time.
   He must have been worried. 

   I was a little worried. He was puffing through his lips for no good reason, as he did 20 years ago before the bypass surgery. 
   I was trying not to worry about that.

The Widow Hood

    Several things are happening:

   • Sunday while Song and I were dismantling Michael’s cubicle at work, creatures of the type not covered by my homeowner’s policy held WWF auditions atop some fragile drywall between the attic and the landing where the washing machine sits. I came home to find washer, landing and stairwell full of blown-in insulation and rat poo. 

   I have a call in to a well recommended contractor, but in the meantime am not turning on the heating because there also is a creature hole on the corner of the roof outside. It’s unusually cold for October — we’re having one of those Arkansas Octobers, which might as well be Arkansas Decembers or Arkansas Mays or Arkansas Februaries ... any month might happen at any time here. It’s cold enough that creatures will be looking for warm cubbies to move into, and I don’t want to make the attic any more enticing than it already obviously is. Let it remain a cold place until a contractor closes up the hole and repairs the ceiling.

   The cats have been huddled, miserable, in their plush beds. That is, they are using for the first time ever the plush bends Michael bought them.

   This evening I brought my studio space heater upstairs to take the edge off the 58-degree den, and everything eased just enough that love and peace reigned for an hour. Ollie and I curled up to eat soba noodles and watch Grey’s Anatomy in standard definition.

   But then the space heater tripped a breaker. 

   Back we are in the icebox.

   • Standard definition is the new rule on the TV here. Now that Michael isn’t watching our TV, my dear daughter-in-law has figured out how to make AT&T sell me fewer and less fabulous TV channels so I can pay less not to watch TV. 

   Michael and I talked about doing that while he was alive (oh! what a painful turn of phrase, “while he was alive”!), because we were wasting money paying for top-level options we neither wanted nor used. But change is a hassle. He preferred to let things ride, even though it made sense to be more conservative with our disposable income since he was made part-time last year.
   But I should talk. I have been paying $5.38 a day for coffee I could be making at work. That has to change.

   The basic option Caro and I selected includes some HD channels, but only shopping outlets. How mean is that, AT&T? The local channels (which I might watch) are all in standard definition. But standard def looks pretty good when you don’t compare it to HD. I will probably miss the heck out of AMC and HBO, but now I have an incentive to use Michael’s Netflix subscription and stream Amazon Prime.

   • The coroner signed the death certificate in time for the memorial, so the cremains were ready for us. But the sexton at Mount Holly and his assistants were all unavailable last week while the family was gathered. So I have Michael’s cremains tucked into a niche here at home. 

   I thought it would make me insane with grief having them in the house, but compared with the mess on the landing, they are easy to live with. 
   And this delay gives me time to make a ceramic box for them. I am going to make a noble porcelain box, carved all over with cats and fired in soda. 

   Then we will put it into the ground and never look at it again.

   But I will know it is down there, being pretty in the dark.